Case Study

An AI-powered ESG Audit Solution Built on Databricks

A reputed audit firm in the US modernizes its ESG audit processes and empowers auditors with data-driven insights

A leading US-based audit firm enables auditors with an AI solution for ESG audits that is built on Databricks to combine data warehousing, data streaming, and ML – all in an open unified platform for enhanced business value.
Industry & Region: Audit and Advisory Service, USA
Tech Stack & Techniques:
Cloud Computing Platform: Azure, Data Platform: Databricks, Named Entity Recognition: spaCy, POS Tagging: spaCy, Boolean Query Matrix, Information Retrieval: Vector Space Model, Natural Language Processing (NLP): Word2vec, ML Platform: TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Deep Learning: Keras, Data Analysis Library: Pandas, Programming Language: Python, NumPy, JavaScript Library: React
Client Overview
Our client is a well-known audit firm in the US gradually modernizing its manual ESG audit processes using new-age AI solutions for faster project delivery and enhanced ROI.
Business Challenge
The audit firm aspired to further strengthen its capabilities in the field of ESG audits. In line with its process modernization goals, the company wanted to empower its auditors with a modern technology solution that would allow them to leverage ESG data more efficiently and accelerate the audit processes.
Some of their current manual audit mechanisms were impacting the overall audit turnaround time. Moreover, there were times when valuable information embedded in a table, or an image was overlooked. Comparing historical ESG findings for critical audit insights was also a challenge among several other pain points. It was essential to minimize these existing manual dependencies to improve workflow efficiencies and audit quality.
Solution Offered
Combining our deep industry knowledge with data and AI capabilities and Databricks expertise, we proposed an AI-driven ESG audit solution. This intelligent automation solution provided a modern, unified data ecosystem with AI capabilities to fortify the firm’s existing ESG audit processes.
Databricks’ scalable environment fulfilled the need for fast and seamless ingestion of large volumes of CSR documents in diverse formats and integration of all data for efficient analysis. Further, it also allowed our data experts to easily integrate advanced analytics tools, machine learning algorithms, and NLP techniques to drive a range of automated audit features and eliminate the redundancies of manual mechanisms.
The new ESG audit solution offered automated information mining and scoping for GRI/SASB ESG Standards, Topics, Disclosures, and Requirements. It presented top-recommended contextually matching phrases from the CSR documents for a data-driven ESG confidence score and also generated ESG taxonomy from audit documents for robust data evidence.
Databricks provided a collaborative platform with feedback ingestion capabilities for the auditors to easily add information from their subject matter expertise to ML suggestions and build a robust foundation for future ESG audits. On a single platform, the auditors could now analyze and extract Quality XRef data from historic audits to gain insights into how specific ESG criteria were previously evaluated, documented, and measured. Additionally, with features such as interactive Q&A assistance, auditors could even ask questions in the free-flow text to find contextually matching answers.
Value Delivered
  • The ESG audit solution powered by Databricks unified data management, data analysis, and data transformation to enable data-driven audits.
  • It reduced the auditor’s effort in manually going through large documents and accelerated the overall audit process.
  • Advanced analytics improved ESG risk identification and delivered actionable insights for informed decision-making.
  • The Databricks platform’s scalability and flexibility allowed the adaptability of the solution to future business needs.
Want to get a deeper understanding of how Databricks can create value in your ESG audit processes?

AI-powered ESG Audit Solution Built on Databricks

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